


A bitter heart that bides its time

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-21
Updated: 2010-01-21
Packaged: 2017-10-11 18:35:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/115631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ruby's host isn't quite dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A bitter heart that bides its time

She could still taste the sharp tang of Sam's tongue in the back of her throat, even though it had been five days- six, now, almost a week. There was no clock in the hotel room, but Dean's watch ticked over to 12:04 just after he stilled under her hands. His Bible was still on the bed where he had dropped it, and she wondered why he even bothered reading it. It didn't mean anything.

It didn't mean anything at all.

She slammed his head into the floor one more time, just because she could, and watched his blood pool and then soak into the carpet.

It looked, she thought to herself, like a halo.

*

She didn't remember being hospitalized or even being hit by a car; she wasn't even sure she knew her own name. She took time to look at the scars, after, stood naked in the bathroom and touched the red lines that criscrossed her stomach, the gnarled mess that was her mons venus, and the ragged, twisted flesh of her right thigh.

She shouldn't have been alive. She didn't care. She didn't know that her body was missing, and that her mother still visited the empty grave every day.

She did know what they had done to her.

*

When she woke up she was cocooned in darkness, couldn't breathe or speak or _see_ \- there was just darkness, and Sam's fingers digging into her arms and Sam's tongue down her throat. It was a familiar feeling, all of it- Sam's tongue in her mouth, which she did not want to open, Sam's hands on her body, which she did not want to give, Sam fucking her into the mattress while Ruby moaned and screamed and scratched. Ruby liked to draw blood.

Sam liked to bite.

When he tipped her head up with one big hand, she bit back.

She didn't know what was happening or why she was awake now, but her anger carried her forward. She stamped down viciously on the roiling black thing in the back of her mind. She'd be fucked if she let anyone or anything get in her way, now, and this demon, this _thing_ had stolen her body, shredded her skin and her mind and eaten her whole. _I'm still alive!_ , she had screamed, _I'm still here, you stupid bitch!_ Ruby had only coiled tighter.

Sam was choking on his own tongue, blood pouring out of his open mouth and down the front of his shirt. He scrabbled backwards, searching for something on the table- she looked down. The demon-killing knife was in her belt. Neat.

"Looking for this?" she asked, holding up the dagger so that he could see it. _Ruby,_ she thought, _you ever been forced to do something really horrible?_

Afterward, just before she blacked out, she wondered if she was finally dying. When she woke up she was alone in her head. Ruby had disappeared. She didn't have to fight to think, and her body- her _life_ was her own again. Her mother smiled at her, and then the memory faded and was replaced by more recent ones. Her bruises would never heal, and the cuts in her skin were bound together by silk and pus. Moving was agony, but she was far beyond that now, and she had learned how to work through pain and fear under Ruby's tutelage. Now the fear was gone, and there was nothing but pain and a deep, sucking anger that scrambled her thoughts and made her something inhuman.

At least she still had power, the dead girl thought, as she went into the bathroom to wash the blood off of her face.

That was the first day.

*

She didn't wonder what Hell was like, because she had spent the last three months strung up like a piece of meat, battered and beaten and _used_ by every living thing that came her way. At first she had wondered if she was in Hell for her sins, but slowly she had realized that this was just- just her life. Fear slowly became meaningless.

What could they do down there that they hadn't already done on Earth?

No one had _noticed_ , no one had intervened or tried to save her. Castiel and Uriel had looked her right in the eye and done nothing. She waited, and suffered, and when Dean ignored her completely, she gave up.

She was not, apparently, among the saved.

*

On the second day, she found Alastair. He raised his eyebrows when he saw her (he was wearing a banker now, middle-aged and bald and sagging), and said, "You're dead." He sounded puzzled.

"Not quite," she said, and he shook his head. They were the banker's back yard, kiddie pool and manicured grass and a rabbit hutch beside the house. The banker's family were upstairs, laid out in pieces in the master bedroom.

Yes, that was Alastair in there.

She was about a foot away from him now, but he was unruffled. "You're dead. You can't hurt me." His eyes glinted in the sunlight and then flicked black. Those eyes had watched her scream in agony and those hands- not those hands, not this body, not this man- those eyes had watched as she was cut into ribbons of sticky flesh and pooling blood, all for Sam Fucking Winchester.

Who was dead, and hopefully in Hell.

She moved fast, and the knife slid smoothly into Alastair's (no, not Alastair's) hanging gut. She wrenched it upwards and her new strength nearly shattered his ribcage, and she grinned at him when he shrieked. "My turn," she said, letting all of her madness bubble up in her voice (and she was very, very mad). Alastair blinked at her once, and the banker gave her a bewildered look, and then they were both gone in a flare of light.

She wiped the blade on the withered brown grass and left through the back gate. The rabbit was huddled trembling in it's hutch, but she didn't notice it. For her there was nothing but anger and revenge, and the slow countdown to the end. Sam, who had fucked her even though he knew better, Ruby who had started the whole thing, Alastair, who had tortured her for the fun of it. Three down.

Every last one of them had known better, she thought. Alastair and Ruby were demons, but Sam and Dean were human, and monstrous. Three down. After Dean, who she hated almost more than Sam (real fucking noble, she thought, Dean Winchester, savior of humankind), the real fight began.

*

The stupid fucker let her in. He had a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. "That won't help you," she told him.

"Huh, we'll see about that," Dean said, but he had none of his usual bravado. She had hated that bravado, watching him from Ruby's eyes. She could still remember the moment she realized that he couldn't see her; _wouldn't_ help her even if he did see past Ruby. He didn't _care_.

"What's wrong?" she cooed. "Miss your brother?"

The bullets ripped through her body, knocking her back to the wall and lacing her arms and chest with burning lines of pain, but she did not slump to the floor or die, not even when one slammed into her jaw. It was very bloody, she thought, and when he dropped the gun to go for his knife, she punched him in the face.

"You're not even trying, Dean," she said, when he toppled back on to the bed. She sat down beside him. "This is what you get, Dean Winchester," she said, taking him by the shoulders, "for letting me suffer. Hell of a hunter, Dean." She hissed when the fucking handprint burned her palm, and shoved him off the bed. He groaned.

"Your daddy would be real proud, Dean," she said. She slammed him into the floor again. "I'm only gonna hurt you as much as you hurt me," she said. "And you'll see _Sammy_ when I'm done. Promise."

"Go to Hell," he breathed.

She had to laugh at that.

*

The last reckoning came on a Sunday, because she wanted to be sure that God's eyes would be on her. She covered her battered body with new clothes and cleaned the knife until it was slippery and perfect. No angels came down to smite her; no one bothered her at all.

She watched parishioners shuffle out of their church, and then, when it was empty, she went forward into the darkened building. The sun poured down on the whitewashed steeple of the tiny church so that it seemed to glow in the late afternoon. Children squabbled in the park across the street; swallows nesting in its eaves pushed their offspring off the edge. She did not stop to look back at what was behind her. She had a score to settle. The doorway swallowed her up and the last anyone saw of the woman who had been Ruby, who had been beloved, was the determined set of her shoulders and a strange, gleaming knife in her hands.

Outside, a fledgling plummeted towards the ground, caught itself, and, flapping madly, achieved the sky.


End file.
